The battery on my 13 year old ThinkPad T420 had just lasted an hour of a video call without trouble. The newer (by about 7 years) T470p only lasts about 15 minutes when doing very little 🙄
Took delivery of new work laptop today - Thinkpad P1 with a 16C/22T Intel Core i9 Ultra 185H, NVidia RTX2000-based GPU and a touch screen . And the modern wifi card is giving me 370/36Mbps on my home network which is as quick as the external connection so this will be a great boost over my aging T470p
I think we're going to get along well ;-)
Keeping the new laptop busy 🙂
#myCodesCompiling
It's not getting noticeably hot under this load so far (It's beein going for about ten minutes), which is nice. It's been running like this.
Core temps running at about +68°C
!!! EDIT: Ignore this post - I've concluded the tests were invalid !!!
Some tests on the new laptop with a small compile job:
On "CPUs" 0-11 (The Power ones, 6*2 threads) it builds in about 10.1 seconds when tied to a single "thread". On the "Efficient" ones it builds in about 15.5 seconds, and on the low power cores it's about 26.3 seconds.
I then tried with -j2 using two of the 22 threads:
- 1 thread on each of two P cores: 5.7s
- 2 threads on a single P core: 5.3s
Also, I've never really experimented with the "Power mode" options in Fedora/GNome, but for those tests which completed the builds in 10.1 seconds on one core, it's the same whether in "#Performance" or "Balanced" modes. If you switch the "Power Saver" it drops to 19.0 seconds.
I'll also note that it's great to have a system where I can play with CPU #affinity stuff in a controlled manner and also experiment with the three different cores in this machine!
Another quick test since I was doing something that required me to rebuild openjdk from scratch ... Using "Power Saving" mode with all cores, jdk24 took 10m10s to compile
With full performance mode but only the E and LP cores in use it took
For comparison, full performance mode with all cores was 5m33
Power Saver was a lot quieter with the fan noise though!
The same build as above but just using the 6*2 "Power" cores:
- Performance mode: 7m50s
- Balanced mode: 8m45s
- Power Saving mode: 13m7s
I've never been a big user of "htop" in the past but having just found out that it can show CPU core clock speed and temperatures (while still showing the percentage "bars" by coloiur coding the text in green/red I'm almost tempted to start using it more regularly.
Enable clock/temp under "F2"->Display-Options as per the first image below.
Current status: Wondering how much electricity you have to burn through running CPU intensive stuff in qemu before it makes more financial sense to just buy a native machine?
(To be clear, some of this work is emulating s390x, and mainframes aren't cheap, so that's not a practical option ;-) )
Second time today my laptop has fallen over in a heap due to exhausting all the swap. Would be good if Linux could alert you before it falls over ...
<slaps laptop for chewing into swap for no clear reason - zram has been disabled so it's not that>
Doing a firmware update on the P1 ... "Memory training" is a new one on me!
Was wondering why the audio output (3.5mm jack) via my Lenovo laptop dock was being quiet despite the volume being set to maximum on the laptop. Seems that the "Analogue" vs "Digital S/PDIF" output devices are completely different - The analogue option is coming out a lot louder.
Was having problems with suspend on my Lenovo Thinkpad P1 (It would power down screens etc, then bring them back up). Various solutions in different pages online but the one that worked was setting."NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=0" instead of 1 in /lib/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf
When travelling laptop wasn't suspending, running fans in case and chewing battery
For future searches, the error was:
PM: pcm_pm_suspend(): nv_pmops_suspend [nvidia] returns -5
PM: failed to suspend async: error -5
I really need to find a way to get notified sensibly when the RAM use on my laptop gets too high. About twice a week I'm exhausting the RAM, the machine freezes and then maybe the OOM killer kicks in after ten minutes or so, or I often give up and do a hard reboot.
Anyone else got tips for this scenario (other than containing certain apps access to RAM?)
So I've had this new laptop a few months and it's about time to upgrade to the new Fedora 44. But do I reinstall? A few reasons to do so
- It would give me a larger /boot which is currently 1GB (Would go up to 2GB)
- I could sort out the almighty mess I made of how I installed the cuda drivers ...
- I've managed to chew through 750GB of storage on this thing and that's reason enough for a reset (container images mostly I expect)
- I could see if my install notes are compreshensive enough ...
🤔
I've now contained both the web browser (8GiB) and slack (2GiB) on my primary laptop via cgroups (as well as the CPU core segregation I already had) in an attempt to avoid the system running out of memory when running larger builds alongside normal desktop application usage. Let's see if there are any negative effects from this.
So far everything is still feeling responsive 🤞
Also thanks to @ben for pointing me at this zswap vs zram article https://fosstodon.org/@ben@hardill.me.uk/116664562204657948
Didn't start browser or slack under cgroups and my machine has frozen for the last 20 minutes or so when running a build 🙄
Looks like it's finally killed Firefox (not slack this time although it had gone completely unresponsive so I'll kill and restart it anyway).
Well it was probably time for a ☕ break anyway.
I do find it a little odd that of my Thinkpad dock's two options the analogue one is much louder (Probably about 2X)
Definitely the right option when I've got two fans running in the home office to day with this heatwave in the UK and need to be able to hear calls over the noise. 🫠🇬🇧 #climateChange #climateChangeTips ;-)
It's pretty much always Slack that gets the chop first when this happens, despite it supposedly being limited to 2G of RAM and 2G of swap via cgroupsV2
Side note: <Shakes fist at AI for making RAM so expensive>
